Reply To: specific foreign languages ?

[zapkitty]

Oooops… NASA cruelly shatters my dream of a steampunkish nightmare kludge of pipes, tanks and fins cycling and venting away on orbit…

http://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov/SE/theProjects/project-detail.cfm?experimentID=24

… sealed commercial cryo-coolers… who would have thought it? 🙂

We still have to deal with hundreds of watts through cold plates that must be kept at 70c but that’s simple compared to what’s already required for the DPF box and VASIMR engines.

As for choice of coolant… I still want to check out using the water (water/antifreeze) coolant for all of it. Savings in mass and power there as opposed to He when you begin budgeting for storing and pumping the stuff. Instituting a strict no-freeze operations regime while simultaneously building the radiator freeze-tolerant and using isotope heaters in the plumbing at critical points should handle that problem.

Regardless of coolant, an appropriate radiator assembly in line with with the main radiator should do the trick and also handle the other intermediate cooling tasks you mention as well.

Numbers coming up…